William Seward Burroughs Quotes

Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

William Seward Burroughs

1. Never give anything away for nothing. 2. Never give more than you have to (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). 3. Always take back everything if you possibly can.

William Seward Burroughs

You see control can never be a means to any practical end. Control can never be a means to anything but more control like Junk.

William Seward Burroughs

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

William Seward Burroughs

There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it.

William Seward Burroughs

Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.

William Seward Burroughs

Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.

William Seward Burroughs

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.

William Seward Burroughs

A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on.

William Seward Burroughs

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary it's always imaginary world in which I would like to live.

William Seward Burroughs

Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.

William Seward Burroughs

The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.